Pat Bertram

MS. CICY’S NIGHTMARE — Chapter 1e

July 7, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Ms. Cicy’s Nightmare is a fictional work in progress set at a dance studio where I take classes. All the characters have real life counterparts (except perhaps me as the narrator. I’m not sure how real I am). I have everyone’s permission to use their names. Here’s hoping I end up with as many friends at the end of the project as I have now. If you’ve missed any of the story to date, you can find it here: Ms. Cicy’s Nightmare

***

“I don’t have any secrets,” Royann said. Royann is our lady in red — not only does she love the color, she is passionate, simulating, impetuous. Her zest for life keeps her on the move and keeps a huge smile on her animated face. But now, beneath her relentless optimism, I sensed a strain, as if she did indeed, have a secret she was keeping even from herself. Or perhaps the strain came from continued dealings with an ex-husband who had divorced her after forty-two years and seven children. He’d hidden their considerable assets so she ended up with only her social security and small pension, and he was trying to take those from her, too. Royann seems radiantly happy now that she’s remarried, and yet there is that telltale strain.

The exotic notes and strong percussion of Arabic music sounded in the studio. Cicy stretched with us then moved to the center of the floor and led us in a series of steps — figure eights with our hips, common motion, hip lifts, rond de jambes. Afterward, we practiced the dance we knew, the one we’d performed on stage.

As we danced, I thought how much I would miss Jan when she was gone, then I paused midstep. What the hell was wrong with me? I wasn’t going to kill Jan for real. It was a story, a game.

Ms. Cicy stopped the music. “You’re not together. When you dance in a group, Pat, the group has to act like one person. Let’s start again.”

To be continued . . .

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

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MS. CICY’S NIGHTMARE — Chapter 1d

July 6, 2014 — Pat Bertram

***

Although I took six classes from Ms. Cicy, I shared only one class with Jan, Arabic dancing. On Tuesday ballet class came first at 10:00am, and Arabic followed immediately after. While some of us were taking ballet, Jan had a different class with a different teacher, and she arrived at Ms. Cicy’s studio right after her other class, already dressed in her belly dance skirt.

Samm usually took ballet, but she missed class occasionally due to other obligations, and the morning I shot Jan’s photo was one of those occasions. A few others whom you have not yet met (I’m trying not to commit the unforgivable authorly sin of introducing too many characters at once, and I am failing miserably) came when their schedules permitted, but I’d never missed a Tuesday class. I don’t know what I hoped for — maybe grace or strength. I was too old to ever become a ballerina and I didn’t have a ballet body or even ballet feet. Ms. Cicy had to keep reminding me to point my toes, and when I stood on the balls of my feet, my heels barely lifted off the ground. Regardless of my shortcomings as a ballerina, I approached the class with all the dedication I could muster. I’d even made myself a black ballet skirt to put myself in the proper frame of mind and body.

After stowing my camera in my dance bag, I unwrapped my ballet skirt from around my waist and donned my orange and turquoise Arabic practice skirt. I stood at the barre and waited for class to begin. Samm found her place at the barre behind me.

“When did all this happen?” she asked.

I turned to face her. “When did what happen?”

“I don’t know how it all started with Jan. Was it your idea?”

Corkey had been silent during the picture taking and the between-class bustle, but now she spoke, sounding surprised at Samm’s question. “You were there. It started a couple of months ago when we all went to see the Trocks.” By “Trocks” she meant Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a glorious and gloriously funny all male ballet troupe. “When we were at lunch before the show, someone mentioned that Pat was a writer. Jan suggested she write a book about us and even volunteered to be the victim.”

“Oh.” Samm slid one slim leg behind her in a deep lunge and stretched her body forward. “I sat at the other end of the table that day, so I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know either,” Marilyn said. Marilyn was a quietly cheerful woman who seemed to take everything in stride despite the major losses she had suffered. Or maybe the loss of her husband and best friend had taught her to take things as they came. Either way, she was easy to talk to and easy to be around. “My son and grandson met me that day, and I ate with them.” Her greenish eyes twinkled with pixyish delight. “Maybe we should all tell Pat a secret that will come out during the story.”

Samm continued to stretch, and Corkey drew tendus on the floor with her properly pointed feet. Their so obvious non-response to Marilyn’s suggestion made me wonder what secrets they were hiding. Was it my obligation as a writer to pry out those secrets, or did my obligation as a friend demand that I leave them alone?

To be continued here: Chapter 1e

***

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MS. CICY’S NIGHTMARE — Chapter 1c

July 5, 2014 — Pat Bertram

***

Samm, a lithe woman of unknown years (unknown to me, that is) with wonderfully flawless dark skin, entered the dance studio. She was the type of woman who could randomly pull two or three unmatched items out of her closet and look as if she’d spent hours dressing herself for a Vogue photo shoot. That day she wore her purple practice skirt, which wrapped twice around her hips (mine barely wrapped once, if you must know), a maroon scarf tied into a turban-like affair, and a bluish-purple long-sleeved shirt with the tails tied at her waist. It wasn’t only her age Samm was quiet about, but her earlier years, too. Perhaps she had been a model at one time. Or maybe she had reason to be secretive — a woman with a sordid past.

Samm watched me take the photo of Jan in her death pose below the barre, then asked, “how are you going to get Jan into that exact position when she’s killed?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

“Maybe she was trying to reach the barre so she could die dancing,” Samm said.

Jan gave a little laugh. “That’s too true to be funny.” Then, more seriously, she added, “Dying while dancing is how I’d like to go out. I just wouldn’t want to die on stage with all those people watching like a friend of mine did.”

“Dying to Dance would be a good name for the book,” I said. “Or maybe Sashaying with Death. Or Death en Croix.”

“Why does it have to be death.” Cicy said with a moue of distaste. Ms. Cicy is our teacher, a 77-year-old with the body of a woman half her age and the legs of a teenager. When she dances, you can almost see the years melt away, and she is young again.

“Maybe we could call it Ms. Cicy’s something,” I said

“Ms. Cicy’s Nightmare.” Cicy giggled, sounding about seventeen. “Maybe you don’t really kill Jan. Maybe I wake up and find that I dreamt the whole thing.”

“Great title,” I said, hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice I didn’t comment on her idea about Jan’s death being a dream. It’s a time honored ending, of course, but I thought if I were going to go through the trouble of killing Jan, it should be for real.

Glee lit Cicy’s beautiful dark eyes. “I could be the murderess. I have experience.”

I felt my jaw drop. Cicy had experience with murder? It seemed impossible that anyone who danced with such expressive moves — moves that spoke of life — could have a history of violence.

“It was a murder weekend,” Cicy explained. “I was the murderess, a princess from a foreign country. I even wore a tiara.”

I blew out a breath of relief, glad I didn’t have to alter my impression of the dance teacher, at least not yet. “But why would you want to murder Jan?”

Cicy exchanged glances with Jan, who had risen and was smoothing her skirt. “Maybe she stole my choreography.”

I understood the need to protect one’s work any way one could, yet in truth, Cicy routinely gave us her choreography. Every step she taught gifted us with her work.

Still, such an irrational theft, as minor as it might seem to the danceless, could be a killing offense, especially if Jan were to give Cicy’s work to a rival instructor. (I’ve lost track of how many dance classes Jan took. Three or four from Ms. Cicy, and at least a couple more from other teachers. In the dance world, such promiscuousness could be motive enough for wanting someone dead.)

I am new to dance, but even I had experienced the deep emotions dredged up by dancing. In just a few short months, dancing had become a need, a pilgrimage, a soul quest.

“Do you know how long it will be before the cops get here,” I asked Jan, thinking how disappointed I would feel if class had to be cancelled.

“A long time. Maybe a couple of hours.”

That seemed excessive to me, but I figured Jan should know since her husband is a retired criminalist.

I looked around the dance studio. The place wasn’t large, perhaps fifteen feet wide by sixty feet long. Mirrors lined one long wall and a barre stretched across the opposite wall. A small nook at the back of the studio had been furnished as a miniscule waiting room, and a corner had been cordoned off with a counter and cabinet for an office. Pictures and posters hung on the walls, but other than that, the studio was empty.

“If we have to stay here for a couple of hours waiting for the cops, we might as well have a class,” I said. “The floor will be mostly bare since Jan’s body won’t take up much room, we’d be dressed for the occasion, and our minds would not yet have processed the truth. I like the idea of a group of aging women dancing in the face of death.”

By this time, the rest of the class had arrived. All eight women stared at me with various shades of disbelief, but I shrugged off their attitude. This was my story, my murder, and I could choreograph it any way I wished.

Jan shook her head with mock sadness. “I am truly hurt that no one will mourn me.”

“Of course, we’ll mourn you,” I told her. “But it will have to wait until after class.”

Jan smiled, but I don’t think she thought my comment funny.

To be continued here: Chapter 1d

***

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MS. CICY’S NIGHTMARE — Chapter 1b

July 4, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Ms. Cicy’s Nightmare is a fictional work in progress. All the characters have real life counterparts (except perhaps me as the narrator. I’m not sure how real I am). I have everyone’s permission to use their names. Here’s hoping I end up with as many friends at the end of the project as I have now. If you’ve missed any of the story to date, you can find it here: Ms. Cicy’s Nightmare

***

Before belly dance class the next week, I asked Jan how she wanted to be killed. Since she’d initiated this lethal game, I thought it only right that she got to choose the means of her demise. So much fairer than the way life works, wouldn’t you say? I mean, few among us get to choose our own end. Life, the greatest murderer of all times, chooses how we expire, whether we will it or not.

Jan laughed at my question and said she didn’t care.

Death is often messy — and smelly — with blood and body wastes polluting the scene, and I did not feel like dealing with such realities. Besides, the murder was to take place at Ms. Cicy’s dance studio, and I didn’t want to be haunted forever after by the scent of a gruesome end for Jan. It would put a damper on the pure joy of dancing, and I couldn’t allow that to happen.

So . . . no blood, body wastes, smells, or any unpleasantness. It would be a nice gentle murder befitting our nice, gentle victim. Poison, perhaps, or a blow on the head. Neither of those means of murder would be particularly gentle on Jan, of course, but then it’s not her sensibilities I’m worried about. After all, she’d be dead and beyond such matters.

I continued to fret over motives. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would want Jan dead, but I kept on with my preparations for her murder. One day I brought my camera to class so I could take a photo of her would-be corpse lying on the studio’s wooden dance floor. When Jan walked into the studio, dressed in her green and beige silk belly dance practice skirt, I asked if she’d play dead for me. I expected to have to take several shots to get the pose I wanted, but she sank to the floor as gracefully as she did everything else, and lay in the ideal pose.

Right then I knew I could kill Jan. She was just too damn perfect.

To be continued here: Chapter 1c

***

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If You Like the Movie “Enemy” . . .

July 3, 2014 — Pat Bertram

If you liked the movie Enemy, you might enjoy my novel, More Deaths Than One. Both stories are about doppelgangers of a sort. In Enemy, Adam sees his other self in “reel life” while In More Deaths Than One, Bob sees himself in real life.

Insomniac Bob Stark has returned from eighteen years in SE Asia and is sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of the night reading the current newspaper when he sees an obituary for his mother, a woman he buried twenty-two years previously. He goes to her funeral and watches the service from the shadows of a lilac bush.

Clustered with their backs to him stood a man, a woman, and six children ranging in age from about two years old to about sixteen. The obituary had mentioned six grandchildren, Bob recalled. Were these six his brother’s offspring, by an ex-wife, perhaps?

One of the children, a pudgy little boy, reached out and yanked the pigtails of the taller, skinnier girl slouching next to him. She slapped him. The next moment they were rolling on the ground and pummeling each other.

The woman turned around. “Stop it, you two.”

Bob sucked in his breath. Lorena Jones, his college girlfriend? What was she doing here? How did she know these people? He certainly hadn’t introduced her to them.

Feeling dizzy, he studied her while she scolded the children. Deep lines and red splotches marred her once satiny smooth face, and her body appeared bloated, as if she had not bothered to lose the extra weight from her last pregnancy or two. Despite those changes, she looked remarkably like her college picture he still carried in his wallet along with the Dear John letter that had ended their relationship.

Lorena nudged the man next to her. “Robert Stark, don’t just stand there. Do something.”

The man she called Robert Stark turned around to admonish the children.

Bob stared. The other Robert Stark seemed to have aged a bit faster than he, seemed more used, but the resemblance could not be denied. He was looking at himself.

Although some of the themes of the movie and my book are similar — identity, individuality, irony — my story is much easier to understand, though still surprising. Best of all, you don’t have to deal with spiders, real or symbolic.

***

Posted in writing. Tags: Enemy, More Deaths Than One, More Deaths Than One excerpt, spiders. 3 Comments »

My New (Temporary) Relationship

July 2, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A couple of weeks ago my car broke down, and for a week, the mechanic kept promising to fix it, but all sorts of emergencies got in the way, and he had to take care of those cars first. Emergencies? My car is the only one I have, and during the time it wasn’t working, my 97-year-old father had to go to the emergency room, doctors, and again to the hospital to take care of a medical crisis. How much more of an emergency could there possibly have been? Still, they did fix the car. For a couple of days, anyway.

Two or three days ago, the accelerator cable got stuck when I was out doing errands, and I had to drive back to the house at 5 miles per hour in second gear. I called the mechanic, thinking I’d try to make it to the repair shop, but he said to go home and he would come out and look at the car. I got back to the house, and waited. And waited. And waited. He never came. Never called.

The next day I called him again, and he said he’d stop by after he finished for the day. Again, I waited. And waited. Made sure I had my phone by me so he could call if he couldn’t make it. Never came. Never called.

So this morning I called him again, and asked if he had forgotten me. He admitted that he had. He promised to come by in an hour or two, and said he’d call when he was on his way. So I made sure I had my phone. And I waited. And waited. He never came. Never called.

Finally I left to go to check on my father (luckily the hospital is within walking distance), and on my way, it occurred to me that this little contretemps with the mechanic seemed remarkably like a relationship, always waiting for him to stop by or call.

I know all relationships aren’t like that, but enough of them are to make me glad that my foray into online dating didn’t work out. I can just see me, sitting by the phone or the door the rest of my life, waiting for calls that never come, for visits that never materialize. Ouch.

Luckily, this particular relationship is a finite situation. One day the car will be fixed and I’ll have my life back. And that will be the end of waiting for men folk who so easily forget that I am alive.

***

Posted in life, relationships. Tags: mechanic, waiting, waiting for calls, waiting for men. 3 Comments »

MS. CICY’S NIGHTMARE — Chapter 1a

July 1, 2014 — Pat Bertram

***

I didn’t want to kill Jan — it was her idea. I’ve literarily killed hundreds of thousands of people, so it shouldn’t have been difficult to murder one dainty older woman, but the truth is I couldn’t think of a single reason to kill her. She is charming, kind, with a smile for everyone, and the ghost of her youthful beauty is still apparent on her lovely face.

It’s not that I object to killing, you understand. I could easily kill my verbally abusive alcoholic brother, and as a matter of fact, I almost did so today. He broke my bedroom window and screamed obscenities at me while I cleaned up the glass. At one point, I hefted a platter-sized piece of glass and considered Frisbeeing it at his neck, but it seemed like too much trouble. There would not only be the glass to clean up, but all the blood and his dead carcass. So not worth it!

Besides, there’d be no mystery to his death — anyone who heard that relentless verbal assault would understand my need to kill him. The only mystery would be if I could get away with the crime.

Killing someone no one would ever have a reason to kill, like Jan — now, that would be a true mystery. And a challenge.

I blogged about the possibility of murdering Jan, of course. I blog about everything — blogging is my outlet, my support, my discipline. Readers expressed the opinion that killing off one’s friends is a good way of losing those friends, and I had to agree. Alive, Jan is so much sweeter — and sweeter smelling — than she ever would be dead. Besides, I enjoy dancing with Jan, both in the classroom and onstage. (Okay, so our class danced together on stage only once, but it was special for all that.)

The day after I decided not to kill Jan, several of us dancing classmates went to lunch together. When we turned to leave the restaurant after munching on salads and sandwiches, I accidentally swung my dance bag and narrowly missed hitting Corkey, a tanned, elegant blonde a couple of years older and a couple of inches shorter than me.

Corkey deadpanned, “I’m not the one who volunteered to be the murder victim.”

That cracked me up, and right then I decided I had to follow through with the project. I mean, really — how could I not use such a perfect line?

To be continued here: Chapter 1b

***

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Temper, Temperament, and Temperature

June 30, 2014 — Pat Bertram

My life continues its bizarre and zigzagging path into chaos. I finally got my car back from the auto shop, and like a human, it paid me back for the kindness with a temper tantrum. (It is strange how often people treat badly those who do them a favor.) The accelerator cable got stuck when I was out doing errands today, and I had to drive back to the house at 5 miles per hour in second gear. It was almost humorous, actually, but it wouldn’t have been so humorous if I’d gotten reamed crossing a busy street at such a miniscule speed. The mechanic will come look at it later. Old cars are temperamental and have such peculiar things going wrong. This time it’s probably a spring. Or at least I hope it’s that innocuous.

Besides that, I’ve been getting into fights with everyone today, especially the men in my life. They think I should blindly accept whatever they say, and I don’t think I should. I suppose it’s possible I’m at fault, but it’s hard to believe that no matter who I talk to and about what, I’m in the wrong. I should be right about something, don’t you think? It seems impossible to be wrong in everything I say. (That’s why I like this blog. I can say whatever I want, and blithely continue on my life without everything turning into an argument.)

My father is still in the hospital, and he’s being more temperamental than usual. Every time I talk to him, he’s castigating me for something. Yesterday he was accepting of the possible need for a catheter for the rest of his life, but he was insistent that I get him out of there at that very moment. Wasn’t happy with me at all when I said we had to wait to find out what was going on. He did acquiesce to staying a bit longer when I reminded him that there were no pain medications at the house.

Today when I went to see him, he was upset with the idea of the catheter and refused to go home with it still inserted. He’d been having troubles with incontinence, and he said he didn’t mind my having to change his diapers if it got to that point. (Of course, he didn’t ask if I minded.) When I reminded him that the catheter was to drain his bladder, and that it was the full bladder that caused him pain, he got mad at me. He also said he was willing to stay in the hospital longer. Yikes.

I understand that he wants to be in control and that he thinks having a catheter means turning his body over to a machine, but he doesn’t seem to understand the realities of a 97-year-old body — that the body is in control. If it’s not working, it’s not working. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he will get the use of his bladder back. And maybe he will — luck is generally on his side.

Hundred degree temperatures don’t cool people’s tempers, but I’m trying to be as patient as I can. I hope the people I see are giving me the same courtesy.

***

Posted in life, relationships. Tags: bladder doesn't work, catheter, temper tantrum, temperamental, temperature. 10 Comments »

Doing Things Backward

June 29, 2014 — Pat Bertram

For all my other books, the story came first, and the cover was a bit of an afterthought, but for my soon-to-be-started writing project — a story of a murder that takes place at a dance studio with all my real life dancing classmates as the characters — I decided I needed the inspiration of seeing the cover. A big thank you to our victim Jan for her so elegant pose (she just sank down to the floor and there she lay in the perfect pose) and to Ms. Cicy for contributing the “Nightmare.”

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Posted in books, writing. Tags: book cover, cover first, Ms. Cicy's Nightmare. 5 Comments »

The Science of Creating Creativity

June 28, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A friend sent me an article This Is Your Brain on Writing, thinking I might get a blog post out of it, and as you can see, I did.

The article explains about research into the neuroscience of creative writing. The experiment, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, showed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories, but they found a big difference between novice and professional writers. According to Lotze, the inner workings of the professionally trained writers showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports. They also showed more activity in the regions involved with speech, while the novice writers seemed to activate more their visual centers.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, wasn’t convinced that the experiments provided a clear picture of creativity, saying that “creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study.”

I don’t know who is right, but I don’t quite see how this experiment showed anything about how authors write a story.

According to the article, Dr. Lotze wanted to scan people while they were actually writing. But he couldn’t give his subjects a keyboard to write with, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would have hurled it across the room. So Dr. Lotze ended up making a custom-built writing desk, clipping a piece of paper to a wedge-shaped block as his subjects reclined. They could rest their writing arm on the desk and scribble on the page. A system of mirrors let them see what they were writing while their head remained cocooned inside the scanner.

Um, yeah. That’s exactly how I write — lying on my back with my head wedged into a neuroscanner, my arm reaching up to scribble on papers clamped to a desk I can only see through mirrors.

How could that very process of the experiment not affect the ultimate creativity of a writer? Perhaps the professional writers were more used to working under diverse conditions. Maybe they couldn’t relax enough to visualize their story, and so told it to themselves as they wrote. Maybe the novice writers were able to visualize their stories because they found it harder to actually write under such conditions. Maybe the novice writers were novices because they were involved with a whole slew of other creative mechanisms — etching or sculpting, for example. Maybe professional writers might not have time to indulge in various art forms, so were more linear. Maybe . . . well, as you can see, there are a whole lot of possible maybes not touched on in the article.

The way I see the experiment is that the scientists didn’t learn anything about true creativity in the wild, but only in captivity. Most of us create our own milieus for writing — in perfect silence or with music in the background, writing by hand in bed or sitting at a desk clicking a keyboard, whenever life permits or within strict timeframes.

We generally don’t let others to dictate how we write, and if we did allow such interference, for sure it would change our process in the same way that dancing on a miniscule stage in an informal setting is different from dancing on a vast stage with thousands of people watching, and both are different from dancing in a studio. (If it weren’t different, all dancers would be satisfied with simply dancing in their living rooms.) So obviously, one’s outer space helps determine one’s inner space, which pretty much negates the experiment since they didn’t take environmnet into consideration.

Besides, our brains are only a small part of the creative process. We write with our souls, our bodies, our very beings. And anyway, why do we need to know how our brains create creativity? It won’t make our writing better. Only writing (and living) can make our writing better.

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